You look at your list of @replies on Twitter and notice this gem from an admirer:
yo yu lookin hella coo, grrrl
1 minute ago
Wait! Before you delete that sloppy social media come-on, realize that the sender might not be drunk or illiterate but just a resident of Los Angeles.
We may think our accents are masked when we're typing at a keyboard or clacking away with our thumbs on a mobile device, but they're not.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University presented a study on Twitter "dialects" at a meeting of the Linguistic Society of America this week, according to Reuters. The group pored over 380,000 tweets by 9,500 users that were drafted in March 2010. They were able to track down the location of a user to about 300 miles by examining his or her spelling.
Apparently those in northern California are more likely to write "koo" as a shorthand for cool, whereas their southern California counterparts prefer "coo." New Yorkers use "OD" as an alternative to "very," while Californians prefer "hella," according to the study's authors. And that "uu" you see when the Twitterer seems to have made a typo? It's probably a New Yorker writing "you" (folks in big cities elsewhere like "yu" better).
Observers have noted the way members of different racial groups use Twitter. In a piece for Slate magazine, tech columnist Farhad Manjoo dove right into the subject in his article, "How Black People Use Twitter."
To suggest blacks use social media differently from non-blacks may seem overly simplistic, but based on some decent research, he writes, "Black people—specifically, young black people—do seem to use Twitter differently from everyone else on the service. They form tighter clusters on the network—they follow one another more readily, they retweet each other more often, and more of their posts are @-replies—posts directed at other users."
Are any Twitterisms uniquely Canadian? Torontonian? Haligonian? Saskatchewanian? Tell us in the comments.
Dakshana Bascaramurty